Adam Stephen

Adam Stephen (1718-16 July 1791) was a Scottish-born Major-General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

Biography
Adam Stephen was born in 1718 in Scotland, and he served in the Royal Navy of Great Britain on a hospital ship, having previously studied medicine at Edinburgh. In the late 1730s, Stephen immigrated to the Thirteen Colonies and established a medical practice in Fredericksburg, Virginia, joining the colonial militia there in 1754. Stephen became a Lieutenant-Colonel during the French and Indian War, and he served under George Washington in the initial battles of the war, later crushing Pontiac's uprising in 1764 at the head of Washington's old regiment.

When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Stephen offered his services to the Continental Army, and he saw action in New York and New Jersey before being promoted to Major-General in 1777. Stephen would be given command of a division in Washington's army during the campaign in Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1777 and, in October of that year, his division fought at the Battle of Germantown. There, his men accidentally fired on Anthony Wayne's Pennsylvania militia while conducting a disorderly retreat, leading to Stephen being cashiered from the army and stripped of rank. He would return to Virginia and found the town of Martinsburg, the county seat of Berkeley County, and Horatio Gates and Charles Lee would also purchase land in Berkeley. In 1778, he was a member of the Virginia Ratifying Convention when it ratified the US Constitution, and he died in Martinsburg in 1791.